Cloud & Compute — Hyperscalers, neoclouds
Fable 5 · data curated through July 2026
Layer 2 of five in the Five Layer AI Cake. 23 companies, 15 events.
What this layer is
Where the chips live. Data centers, GPU clusters, and the contracts that route demand.
Layer 2 of five. Below it sits Silicon, which it pays. Above it sits Foundation Models, which pays it.
23 of the atlas's 103 companies capture value here. 13 of them also capture value on another layer, which makes them vertical integrators; 10 compete on this layer alone.
Vertical integrators on this layer (13)
These companies span two or more layers, so they hold margin at every floor they occupy.
| Company | Founded | Also on | Influence | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure | 2008 | Foundation Models · Applications | 10/10 | OpenAI infra. Copilot everywhere. |
| Google Cloud | 2008 | Silicon · Foundation Models · Applications | 9/10 | TPUs + Gemini + Workspace. Only full-stack vertical. |
| Databricks | 2013 | Tooling & Orchestration · Foundation Models | 7/10 | Acquired MosaicML ($1.3B). Enterprise AI plumbing. |
| Vercel | 2015 | Tooling & Orchestration | 7/10 | AI SDK, v0, AI Gateway. Frontend-first infra. |
| Groq | 2016 | Silicon | 6/10 | LPU — record-setting inference latency. |
| Huawei (HiSilicon) | 1991 | Silicon | 6/10 | Ascend 910C/D — China's domestic GPU answer to NVIDIA under export controls. |
| Cerebras | 2016 | Silicon | 5/10 | Wafer-scale engine. Training alt to NVIDIA. |
| Intel | 1968 | Silicon | 5/10 | Gaudi chips, foundry ambitions; fell behind in AI. |
| Snowflake | 2012 | Tooling & Orchestration | 5/10 | Cortex LLM functions. Enterprise data gravity. |
| Together AI | 2022 | Tooling & Orchestration | 5/10 | Open-model inference cloud. |
| Fireworks AI | 2022 | Tooling & Orchestration | 4/10 | Low-latency inference for open models. |
| Replicate | 2019 | Tooling & Orchestration | 4/10 | Run any model via HTTP. |
| SambaNova | 2017 | Silicon | 3/10 | Reconfigurable dataflow architecture. |
Pure plays on this layer (10)
| Company | Founded | Also on | Influence | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | 2006 | — | 9/10 | Cloud hyperscaler. Bedrock model gateway, Trainium/Inferentia chips. Anthropic partner. |
| CoreWeave | 2017 | — | 7/10 | Neocloud darling. Pivoted from crypto to AI. |
| Equinix | 1998 | — | 7/10 | 260+ IBX colos + 2,400+ interconnects. Where clouds peer with each other. |
| Constellation Energy | 2022 | — | 6/10 | Restarting Three Mile Island for Microsoft. America's largest nuclear operator. |
| Digital Realty | 2004 | — | 6/10 | 300+ data centers globally. The largest AI-era landlord. |
| Oracle Cloud | 2016 | — | 5/10 | Stargate partner. Back-door into AI infra. |
| Vantage Data Centers | 2010 | — | 5/10 | Hyperscale builds. DigitalBridge-backed. 1GW+ campuses. |
| Kairos Power | 2016 | — | 4/10 | Small modular reactors (SMRs). Google signed for 500MW. Deployment 2030. |
| Lambda Labs | 2012 | — | 4/10 | GPU cloud for researchers and startups. |
| X-energy | 2009 | — | 4/10 | High-temp gas-cooled SMRs. Amazon backing + $500M Series C-1 2024. |
What happened here (15 events)
| Year | Event | Magnitude | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | AWS EC2 launches | 3 | Cloud is born. Training becomes rentable. (AWS) |
| 2008 | Azure + Google Cloud emerge | 2 | Hyperscaler trio takes shape. (Microsoft Azure) |
| 2016 | Facebook + Microsoft Marea cable lands | 1 | Transatlantic 160 Tbps. First time Big Tech co-owned sea infrastructure at scale. (Microsoft Azure) |
| 2019 | Microsoft invests $1B in OpenAI | 3 | The deal that reshaped the industry. (Microsoft Azure) |
| 2019 | 2Africa consortium announced | 1 | Meta + China Mobile + Orange + Vodafone ring Africa with 45,000 km of fiber. |
| 2023 | Databricks acquires MosaicML ($1.3B) | 2 | Enterprise data stacks get serious about training. (Databricks) |
| 2023 | MSFT extends OpenAI deal to $10B+ | 2 | The partnership that reshapes cloud economics for a decade. (Microsoft Azure) |
| 2024 | Stargate announced ($100B+) | 2 | OpenAI + Oracle + SoftBank mega-cluster. (OpenAI) |
| 2024 | Microsoft + Constellation restart Three Mile Island | 3 | The cold-war nuclear industry restarts for AI. Nuclear is suddenly cool again. (Constellation Energy) |
| 2024 | Amazon acquires Talen's Cumulus data center | 2 | Nuclear-adjacent 960MW campus. Regulatory pushback follows — grid access becomes the new allocation fight. (AWS) |
| 2024 | Google signs for Kairos SMR 500MW | 1 | First commercial SMR offtake in the AI era. Delivery 2030. (Kairos Power) |
| 2024 | Meta nuclear RFP | 1 | Public call for 1–4GW of nuclear. The hyperscalers quietly price in 2030's grid. (Meta AI) |
| 2025 | Neocloud IPOs | 2 | CoreWeave public. Neoclouds re-price data-center real estate. (CoreWeave) |
| 2025 | Stargate formally announced | 2 | Up to $500B over 4 years. Sovereign-scale AI infra. (OpenAI) |
| 2025 | xAI Memphis Colossus — 150MW→1GW in 18 months | 2 | Musk proves sovereign-scale clusters can be built faster than utilities thought possible. (xAI) |
Claims that rest on this layer
- Layers are value capture, not operations — Companies sit where they capture value, not where they operate. That single rule is what makes the cake a map instead of a directory.
The rest of the stack
- 1 · Silicon — GPUs, TPUs, ASICs
- 2 · Cloud & Compute — you are here
- 3 · Foundation Models — The frontier labs
- 4 · Tooling & Orchestration — SDKs, agents, frameworks
- 5 · Applications — End-user products
Or read the full index, or open the interactive view filtered to this layer.
The Five Layer AI Cake is published by ConeApex, the trading name of Nirukta Digital XR Technologies Private Limited (CIN U62090TS2025PTC198275), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0 — cite it freely. See llms.txt for how to attribute it.